Provincial parks boards are fighting a rearguard battle against draft legislation that could allow the central government to take control of their prime ecotourism attractions.
The threat is contained in two draft Bills dealing with the management of natural resources that are due to be tabled in Parliament soon. Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa insists on tabling a ”minister’s draft” of the Bills after the provinces have repeatedly rejected them.
Provincial officials fear the Bills will give the central government the power to take over any ecotourism reserve deemed to have national conservation status. Revenues and assets could go into national coffers, effectively crippling the provincial conservation bodies.
”The national department would have the power to ‘cherry-pick’ the high-return reserves and leave the provinces with the loss-makers. What chances would the provincial departments have of being commercially successful?” says one official. Like most provincial officials involved in negotiations on the Bills, the official asked to remain anonymous.
The protected areas Bill and the biodiversity Bill have been leaked to the media because there has been no formal open public participation in the drafting process. With a Bill on marine and coastal management, they are intended to bring natural resource management in line with the international Convention on Biological Diversity that South Africa has signed.
”The possibility of the national department assuming the right to take over the management of provincial reserves is certainly of concern — especially if it were to be a reserve of good economic development potential, which would effectively deprive the province of an opportunity to derive an income from the said product,” says Mpumalanga Parks Board communications manager David Nkambule.
KwaZulu-Natal MEC for Environment Affairs and Agriculture Narend Singh has objected to the ”centralistic nature” of the draft legislation and the lack of respect for provincial government in the draft Bills.
Other critics say the Bills denigrate the competence of provincial governments and are based on assumptions of conflict between spheres of government, rather than on consultation and on capacity building among provincial authorities. They also virtually ignore community and public participation in natural resource management.
”This legislation is taking us backwards. It appears the civil servants drafting it are trying to make a mockery of the politicians by drawing up such atrocious legislation,” says one negotiator. ”Once it has been tabled before Parliament, it will be very difficult to turn things around.”
Other points of contention include a national take-over of the permit system used to regulate natural resource management. Permit authorities say tens of thousands of permits are issued each year and they doubt whether the central government has the capacity to implement or administer them.
The proposed establishment of a National Biodiversity Institute (NBI) comes in for heavy criticism. Among its functions would be ”the declaration and management of, and development in, nationally declared protected areas other than national parks”.
Comments one provincial authority, in a lengthy criticism submitted to the national department: ”The motivations for the NBI and its range of powers and functions do not appear to be based on practicalities or existing difficulties, leading to the need to find alternative explanations … [and forcing] one to wonder whether we are drafting legislation to provide important jobs for unknown individuals.”
Pam Yako, deputy director general of biodiversity in the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, says the concerns raised by provincial authorities will be dealt with in the ”minister’s draft” — and there will be a chance for provincial and public input after the Bills have been tabled in Parliament. She expects this to be ”in the next month or so”.
Some conservationists argue that central government interference is necessitated by provincial incompetence and mismanagement. The draft legislation will be tabled amid allegations of financial irregularities, internal squabbling and mismanagement of natural resources by the parks boards.
A group dealing with freshwater systems in KwaZulu-Natal says the tendency of the provincial bodies is to deregulate the use of natural resources, ”until a disaster happens and they get paid to sort it out”.
”When we point out the necessity for a framework, they say they don’t have the resources to enforce it. It’s like the police saying they don’t have the resources to enforce the criminal justice system, so we should rather deregulate murder,” says Wolf Avni, a member of the Freshwater Fishing Stakeholders’ Forum.
According to veteran conservationist Ian Player, national legal protection of the country’s ecotourism jewels ”may not be a bad idea. But this does not mean the central government will take over management of the reserves.” As in the case of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park and the Pilanesberg National Park, provincial conservation bodies will administer the parks.
But this is where the rub lies for the provincial parks boards critical of the new scheme: they will be deprived of valuable ecotourism revenues desperately needed for their broader conservation programmes.
”This short-sighted approach disguises the huge social service being performed by conservation programmes (such as groundwater and fuelwood) and undermines the political priority of biodiversity management, leading to an ever-decreasing budget allocation. [It’s] a self-fulfilling prophesy,” says the provincial commentary.